What is your favourite single sentence from a TED Talk?

I wanted to keep it going since it really can serve as an important place to store those most succinct and powerful utterances.

I was so struck by Aaron O'Connell closing remarks from his talk in the 4th session of TED2011. Poorly recalled is would be:
"Just as quantum objects are defined by their relationships to other objects, so to are people defined by our connections to other people".

Jun 18 2011:
‘’When you are totally at peace with yourself, nothing can shake you’’.
“Many answers to what you seek don’t lie “out there”. If you look inwards, you’ll find the answer has been in you all along.”
“The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own. You do not blame them on your mother, the ecology, or the president. You realize that you control your own destiny.”
‘’Bad situations happen for me, not to me’’
"You can go on changing the outer for lives and you will never be satisfied; something or other will remain to be changed. Unless the inner changes, the outer can never be perfect."
“Be yourself, you’ve got no choice”
“Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.”

‘’The quality of your life is determined by the quality of your thoughts.”
“Peace comes from within. Do not seek it without.” – Buddha
“Happiness is not a station you arrive at, but a method of travelling.”
“Whenever you see something you dislike, it represents something you are repelling inside of you.”
“Our sorrows and wounds are healed only when we touch them with compassion.” – Buddha
‘’Everything that irritates us (and causes us immense pain) about others can lead us to an understanding about ourselves’’. – Carl Jung
‘’So you have some enemies…good, that means you stood up for something!” – Winston Churchill
‘’If you don’t go after what you want, you’ll never have it. If you don’t ask, the answer is always no. If you don’t step forward, you’re always in the same place’’.
‘’The person who never made a mistake never tried anything new’’.
“You, as much as anyone in the universe, deserve your love and respect.” – Buddha
“Your task is not to seek for love but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it”
“If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.”
‘’Behaviour is the outward expression of the inner spirit. Only ignorant people try to change the outward expressi

Jun 22 2011:
“It is a story about people, us, being persuaded to spend money we don’t have, on things we don’t need, to i
impress people we don’t care about."
This very sentence inspired me to translate this talk into Russian

Secret of Happiness - Find something more important than you are and dedicate your life to it. - Dan Dennett

In practise what is an atheist? An atheist is just somebody who feels about Yahweh the way any decent Christian feels about Thor or Baal or the golden calf. As has been said before, we are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in, some of us just go one god further. - Richard Dawkins

You got to persist through CRAP! which means Criticism, Rejection, Assholes and Pressure. - Richard St. Johns

When we give to the world what we want the most, we heal the broken part inside of each of us. - Eve Ensler

Jun 2 2011:
May - I love that quote too. Elsewhere in the same talk is another of my favourite quotes, when the teacher has pointed out to the child who is trying to paint God that no one knows what They look like and the child replies "They will in a minute". This brings a smile to face nearly every day!

Jun 12 2011:
Mike - that is also one of my all-time favorites! Sir Robinson includes that story in the introduction of his book "The Element". It really encapsulates the way young children are inherently cretive and their willingness to 'create'.

Jun 13 2011:
If Hans Rosling weren't already a favorite speaker of mine, that quote alone would have piqued my curiosity. The speech is as brilliant as every single other one by him. Thank you for linking and quoting it, Andrew :)

My longing had no time when it ceases - from Poem on Love by Eighth century Japanese Poet, quoted by Helen Fisher talk on 'brain in love" at TED.

Hope does not consist of the expectation that things will come out exactly right, but the expectation that they will make sense regardless of how they come out - Vaclav Havel, in book "Breaking the Peace"

May 26 2011:
are you quoting Ben Zander? I remember him talking about this when he explained how he gave all his students an 'A' at the beginning of the year so they got the opportunity to grow into that 'A' instead of having to live up to it.

Jun 1 2011:
I loved this from Simon Sinek and his Start with Why concept: "They key is not to find people who need what you offer; the key is to find people who believe what you believe." Radically altered the way I go about promoting my services.

Jun 18 2011:
‘’When you are totally at peace with yourself, nothing can shake you’’.
“Many answers to what you seek don’t lie “out there”. If you look inwards, you’ll find the answer has been in you all along.”
“The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own. You do not blame them on your mother, the ecology, or the president. You realize that you control your own destiny.”
‘’Bad situations happen for me, not to me’’
"You can go on changing the outer for lives and you will never be satisfied; something or other will remain to be changed. Unless the inner changes, the outer can never be perfect."
“Be yourself, you’ve got no choice”
“Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.”

‘’The quality of your life is determined by the quality of your thoughts.”
“Peace comes from within. Do not seek it without.” – Buddha
“Happiness is not a station you arrive at, but a method of travelling.”
“Whenever you see something you dislike, it represents something you are repelling inside of you.”
“Our sorrows and wounds are healed only when we touch them with compassion.” – Buddha
‘’Everything that irritates us (and causes us immense pain) about others can lead us to an understanding about ourselves’’. – Carl Jung
‘’So you have some enemies…good, that means you stood up for something!” – Winston Churchill
‘’If you don’t go after what you want, you’ll never have it. If you don’t ask, the answer is always no. If you don’t step forward, you’re always in the same place’’.
‘’The person who never made a mistake never tried anything new’’.
“You, as much as anyone in the universe, deserve your love and respect.” – Buddha
“Your task is not to seek for love but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it”
“If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.”

Jun 23 2011:
“The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own. You do not blame them on your mother, the ecology, or the president. You realize that you control your own destiny.”

Jun 16 2011:
Do we really believe most students studying math right now think it's anything other than fairly mindless? Most of the time what they're actually doing is running through a bunch of calculating processes they don't understand for reasons they don't get
Conrad wolfram

Jun 11 2011:
This one I shared with my former students via a news flash as school is out as well as on FB, and I STILL cannot get it out of my mind, for it will be my guiding light. It was taken from a talk by an ordinary, everyday person who did something totally extraordinary due to one life changing event (which of course happens a lot!).

Shelene Bryant ended her talk with this as she looked out into the audience: " I am not concerned that anyone in this room will fail at anything.... My concern is that you're gonna succeed at something that didn't matter."

May 18 2011:
"Good afternoon, good evening, whatever. We can go, jambo, guten abend, bonsoir, but we can also go - - ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh. That is the call that chimpanzees make before they go to sleep in the evening."

Jun 28 2011:
Okay so this is my first post, recently joined and while I have not yet had the opportunity to go through the Ted Talks. I thought I'd add add some extracted notes from a previous read; The Power of Positive Thinking. I hope nobody mines that its not a Ted Talk?

You mentally visualize and affirm and re-affirm your assets and keep your thoughts on them, emphasizing them to the fullest extent, you will rise out of any difficulty regardless of what it may be.

Thoughts create words, for words are the vehicles of ideas. but words also affect thoughts and help to condition if not create attitudes.

How foolish to manufacture personal unhappiness to add to all the other difficulties over which you have little or no control!

The way to happiness; keep your heart free from hate, your mind from worry. Live simply, except little, give much. Fill your life with love. Scatter sunshine. Forget yourfself, think of others. Do as you would be done by.

"According to your faith be it unto you" (Matthey ix. 29.)

Results do not yield themselves to the person who refuses to give himself to the desired results.

"Throw your heart over the bar and your body will follow"

Fire the heart with where you want to go and what you want to be. Get it so deeply fixed in your unconscious that you will not take no for an answer, then your entire personality will follow where your heart leads. "Throw your heart over the bar" means to throw your faith over your difficulties, throw your affirmation over every barrier, throw your visualization over your obstacles. In other words, throw the spiritual essence of you over the bar and your material self will follow in the victory groove thus pioneered by your faith-inspired mind. Expect that best, not the worst, and you will attain you heart's desire. It is what is in the heart of you, either good or bad, strong or weak, that finally comes to you.

Jun 26 2011:
Emily and John, thanks for this thread and the continuation. Reminds me of the "TED Talks in one line" blog that some of us started pre Twitter. I'm enjoying reading everyone's favorite picks and learning from the variation. Here's one of my favorites from TED2011:

"You've given the lectures, so now what do we do ... what I do is I assign the lectures for homework...and what used to be homework, I now have the students doing in the classroom." (Sal Khan).

I like it because the idea of this "flipping" is so fundamental to the Khan academy's achievement.

Jun 25 2011:
"You are witnessing a birth of new era, ... the beginning of a magnificent era - the future we were dreaming for has...arrived," Al Jazeera's Director-General Wadah Khanfar, speaking about the Arab Uprisings at TED2011.